If you are a growing company, your org structure is probably a hindrance. Why? Because you are operating in an org you designed to fit your company 18 months ago. And once you realize you need to change it, the new org structure you implement will also be 18 months out of date.
And oh, yeah, your processes won't fit the new structure either.
So, what do you do about that?
In this blog, we'll explore some of the critical obstacles your Hard Tech start-up will encounter while building your organizational frameworks and strategies and discuss potential solutions to overcome them.
But before we dive into your organizational structure, what do we mean by Hard Tech start-ups? At Market Operandi, we define "Hard Tech" as a hardware or software company that:
Sells B2B
Has a long development cycle for new products & solutions (6 or more months)
Has products that require specialist engineers or salespeople AND sells to customers
who buy to solve problems
Sells into Enterprise Purchasing (multiple constituents coming together for a purchasing decision)
Properly designing your organizational structure is critical to your company's growth, and in the case of fast-growing Hard Tech companies, this is not a one-time exercise. Adept CEOs realize their company's organizational structure will change once, perhaps multiple times, during each growth phase. Furthermore, waiting to restructure solely in response to changing business conditions can paralyze your company and destabilize your employees and their effectiveness. In other words, you must be proactive and nimble if you want to scale and do it quickly.
In the early stages of your Hard Tech start-up, you, as the CEO/Technical Founder, make most of the decisions, even though those decisions may fall well outside your technical expertise. However, as your company grows, you must look 18 months ahead at how your role as CEO will evolve and how the company will operate a year and a half from now.
What do we mean by the "org of 18 months from now"? It means that by the time you've figured out your organizational structure (again) and staffed it up, at least a year will have passed. By then, you'll have outgrown the org that fixes the problems you have today.
An org design process begins with envisioning your future business's inputs and constraints. For example:
How many customers will you have in 2 years (not today)?
How many salespeople will you have, and how will you structure your sales and marketing teams to work together?
How many products a year will you need to generate?
And how many markets will you serve in 2 years (not today)?
Building a thriving tech start-up requires more than just a groundbreaking idea; it requires your willingness to address the challenges associated with organizational structure. Getting the answers right for your business today, but wrong for your business 18-months-from-now, will severely hamper your business instead of accelerating it.
Your business will look different as you progress through revenue stages. Growth is a high-grade problem to have, but it's a problem nonetheless if you haven't structured your org accordingly.
Your org structure will naturally become more complex as you grow:
The number of people will grow.
The number of functions will increase.
You'll need more managers as the number of people, products, and places in your company grows.
However, the complexity that evolves naturally isn't the hard part! You'll also have to anticipate the following:
R&D/Engineering synergies and conflicts
Sales and Marketing's common missions vs. their (sometimes) divergent approaches and objectives
The complexity of your sales process and the need for team selling, account penetration, and digital marketing
The reliance of (current or future) growth on your ability to:
Scale your operations
Innovate with new technology, pioneer new products, and discover new markets
Unless you have experience doing this.
Seem hard? You need people who have done this successfully and done so at different sizes and stages of a company's growth. That is Market Operandi. We have built our practice on this and done it multiple times with our own companies. MO has well-proven systems for getting you through this.